The Talk

Red Team Mission and Mysterious Allies

1

Watchpoint, Gibraltar

The search had gone on through the night and it was early morning when Athena alerted Winston. He had reclined in a huge tire swing and was actually snoring when the computer called his name.

"Winston, are you awake?" Athena said.

Winston blinked a couple of times and took note of his surroundings before picking up his glasses and putting them on his face. "Yes, Athena, I'm here," he yawned and stretched. "Did you find anything?"

"Yes, and I know I'm not really programmed for surprise, but I think I am feeling it," she said. "For lack of a better term, this is simply unbelievable."

Winston moved to the monitors and looked over all the displays. Many news articles cross-referenced were scattered in descending windows along one screen as keywords were being searched and researched across any news stories and media outlets worldwide. One window in the far right corner showed D. Va sound asleep on her desk with an empty Mountain Dew bottle next to her sweet face. This made Winston chuckle to himself.

"What have we got?" he asked. The blurry image of the new Widowmaker assassin appeared on the main screen.

"I used facial recognition to go through databases according to apparent race, nationality, and age for this woman and found a hit in the most unusual place." Athena caused a red mesh to capture some of the facial features around the eyes, nose, face spacing, forehead, and other areas before a picture of the same woman came up in another window and those same meshes appeared one after another on the new picture before the word MATCH flashed on the screen.

"Who is she?" Winston asked squinting up at the monitor.

"That's the surprising part," Athena said. "I was multitasking and going over the data collected from the morgue Agent Amari and Soldier 76 retrieved and it found a match among the reported deceased."

"What?" Winston said with shock. His voice was loud enough to wake D. Va.

"Ugh, game over, man," she mumbled grumpily as she picked up the Mountain Dew bottle, lifted it to her lips, found it empty, and, finally, looked down the bottle neck before shrugging and chucking it into a nearby wastebasket. "What's up? What I miss?"

"Apparently, our mysterious Widowmaker is dead," Winston said.

"O M G! No way!" Hana said with a gasp. "Oh no! Is Lena ok?"

"Not Amélie," Winston said with a shake of his head. "The new one we were trying to identify."

"Oh, wow," Hana said placing a hand to her chest and catching her breath. "Geez, Big Guy, way to give a girl a heart attack first thing in the morning!"

"Sorry, I haven't gotten details yet," he explained. "I guess I should have been more specific."

"The assassin is April Sherman," Athena said. "According to her autopsy reports from the morgue, she was killed from overdosing on recreational narcotics."

"Holy crap on a cracker!" Hana said suddenly wide awake. "That's April What's-her-name that was one of the three bodies Reaper and Talon swiped!"

"How?" Winston asked incredulously. "She had her overdose and died before the assassinations we've seen. How is it her?"

"If Talon learned a way to make zombies, we're in deep trouble," Hana said quietly. "Seriously, this is creepsville."

"The cause of Ms. Sherman's resurrection is unknown at this time," Athena said. "Perhaps we should try and capture her?"